I think that's very well said, and I agree with the other points you made, especially about recorded sound.  Last Friday, a few of us went to see John Mayall - yes, that John Mayall and yes, he is still touring! - at a venue in Santa Cruz, CA.  I haven't been to a live amplified concert like...

Beautiful system, and with a room to match - thanks for the pictures and congratulations on the new arrival!

This question is a big one and I'm not sure I can remember enough to do it justice, but here goes anyway!   Quantization errors occur in a digital system when reducing the number of bits being used to represent something; this is of course particularly true in going from an analog signal...

Since I am sitting here listening to the microRendu right now (mine arrived at noon today) then let me have a go at this: - DAVE can be driven from multiple sources, but the USB input on any DAC is becoming the standard - any device that can output audio over USB can most likely drive DAVE...

This is an incredibly interesting area of research.  A lot has been discovered, but we still have much to learn about how the brain processes sound.  Work on brain processing of visual images indicates that evolution has driven us towards an optimizing model, tailored to allow us to quickly and...

OT: Totally agree - not just the Who's best work, but an unsung rock classic that can still defeat all-comers.  I was living in Brighton at the time it came out, and almost made it as an extra when they showed up later to make the film.

Yeah, this is where I think the marketing spiel gets in the way of us poor audio types trying to get our heads around things.  If the goal is to just "unwrap" MQA files, allowing hi-res content to be streamed in low-res size, then this is perfectly do-able by the streamer.  No problem.  However...

Hmm, interesting.  From what I took away (from a Meridian-led session in Silicon Valley as part of rolling-out MQA) then in order to fully benefit from the "re-mastered" source, the replay chain needed to know not only the characteristics of the recording chain, but also of the decoding...

As far as I understand it, MQA is an umbrella label for two separate technologies which can operate independently or combined.   (I) One feature is that hi-res files can be encoded ("folded" in Meridian's terms) and packaged into 44.1 or 48 kHz files. Without MQA decoding they will play "as...

Ha - that's funny!  I hadn't seen that.  If nothing else, I guess it just goes to show how fast digital techniques have produced solutions that have outstripped earlier analogue-based reproduction chains, to the point where a very significant 48db of extra measurement headroom is required...

Apropos headphone matching, I was just reading the Hugo TT review in Sereophile (Nov. 2015 ... it takes me a while to catch up!)  The reviewer preferred the Audeze LCD-X to the Sennheiser HD800s for headphone listening.  YMMV, of course, but just FYI.  The reviewer also tried Grado, but no...

Congrats on the new baby, Dave, (or new baby Dave) and thrilled to hear it's delivering everything you were looking for!  Have a very musical Xmas!   Keep us in the loop as you learn more.  After all, a vicarious Dave is the closest many of us will come!   John

Funny ... but in a fascinating sort of way!   The internal mechanisms by which the brain interprets incoming sounds must be a topic barely scratched-at as yet, but we can hope that neuro-imaging studies will change this over time.  Even so, you can see, at least from an evolutionary...

The good news here is that we can see at least another two generations of Moore's Law coming up, offering us a 4x increase in transistors per given surface area in the coming 4 to 5 years.  That should allow for room correction to be applied at higher sampling rates and with greater precision...

Excellent - then you are in for a treat!  "Real world" - at least as far as the recording engineers allow it - is an excellent description of the native sound of Dave!